Emma Glass didn’t set out to write a rape revenge story; when she started her debut Peach, she didn’t know what kind of novel she wanted to write. But 10 years ago, as she sat in a creative writing class, she could see what she did not want: the teacher (“a writer who’s quite successful in the UK with fantasy novels”) was leading a class of 20, who all “seemed to have ideas for really high-concept novels”, she recalls. “I guess that’s where stories start, but for me that’s not where the story started.”
Glass was reading Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and was “fascinated with how everyone’s reading of those books is highly different, because the focus is on the language and not necessarily the story”. Stuck, she was going in circles late one night, listening to music, and Peach “literally started with a beat”. She had “an image in my mind of a frustrated or sad person and I identified that person as a young girl, and it really started from there.” That pulse can still be felt in the first line of Peach: “Thick stick sticky sticking wet ragged wool winding round the wounds, stitching the sliced skin together as I walk, scraping my mittened hand against the wall.”
The beat continued as Glass wrote, creating a rhythmic stream of consciousness of often rhyming words, all of which make Peach – a slip of a novel, but also a gut-punch – deeply affecting and very hard to put down. “Once I knew that the girl was in trouble, my mind just kind of rolled out these kind of really sleep-deprived thoughts of a menacing figure,” she says.
Lyrically and visually driven, Glass’s influences are clear in Peach. It also has its own entirely original style. Despite its slimness, it wasn’t written quickly; Glass left it half finished and returned to her native Wales, where she went to nursing school. She’s been a nurse ever since, and it wasn’t until 2016 that she reopened the manuscript and wrote its second half.
Inasmuch as it has a plot, Peach is a rape revenge story, a tale of violence and redemption. It starts with the titular protagonist’s walk home in the dark after the assault, follows her digestion of the traumatic events and culminates in a surreal catharsis, with an ultimately tragic ending. She is surrounded by her family – her sexually liberal parents and her baby brother – and her boyfriend, the loyal, morally robust Green.
But Peach does not, cannot, tell him what happened for fear of becoming “a victim”, being blamed and losing the little control she has. She goes back to school and is haunted by her rapist’s image. “I’m interested in what internalisation can do to a person. What the mind does if you hold on to certain experiences,” Glass says.
The reader sees the world through Peach’s visceral renderings of characters, places, objects: her baby brother has a jelly head, Green is tree-like, and cars “roll in rows in the street on sushi wheels”. Most oppressively, she imagines her rapist as a demonic sausage; the vile stench of barbecued pork follows her around. In one scene, she is in a diner and sees him looking at her through the window, but no one else seems to notice. Later, he “is gone but there is a seven-foot grease streak left on the glass and I can’t believe no one else saw”.
Peach’s characters are ambiguous all the way through. Something Glass found difficult at university was “this obsession with the metaphor”: when she read passages back to her class, they’d praise her perceived use of literary devices. “I was like: ‘What if it’s not? What if it is exactly that straight-up reading of a girl who’s a fruit? What if it just is?’” Her satisfaction with Peach is the myriad readings different people have emerged with – readers can “make it out to be whatever it is they want it to be”.
Glass is conscious that the story will upset a lot of readers, but she stresses that the violence is not gratuitous. She hopes readers will stick with it to the end. “I feel real responsibility towards what I’ve written,” she adds. “I think that it will possibly and hopefully help people … find the language of the ordeal.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
